The present invention relates to a magnetic resonance imaging apparatus that scans a subject to acquire magnetic resonance signals.
A multichannel coil having a large number of coil elements has recently been in widespread use as a receiving coil for receiving magnetic resonance signals of a subject. There has been proposed a method for allowing an operator to select coil elements used to receive magnetic resonance signals out of a large number of coil elements according to a scan region of a subject where the subject is imaged using a multichannel coil (refer to Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2006-175058).
In the above-described method, the operator needs to select the coil elements manually. There has therefore been proposed a method for automatically selecting each coil element according to a scan region set by the operator. Since, however, the operator tends to set the scan region wider than a region of interest, a sensitive region of the selected coil element can become much wider than the region of interest, so that image quality may be deteriorated. It is desirable that the deterioration in image quality is suppressed as much as possible.